When teaching Colorado history to K-12 students, at least 25 more teachers will be incorporating the historical perspective of Latinos.

“I’m going to look at important Hispanic families and talk about how they settled and their contributions to how Colorado developed,” said Jodi Connelly, a third-grade teacher at McElwain Elementary, a dual-language school in the Adams 12 District.

On Thursday, the teachers learned from historians and other teachers about how to incorporate newly gathered historical resources that document Latinos in Colorado into their history lessons.

“I challenge you to take a regular assignment you do and figure out a way to insert a primary source or a story,” Michelle Pearson, a teacher who led part of the class, told the group. “It makes it a richer experience.”

Tanya Batzel, a Cherry Creek middle-school curriculum-program coordinator, said she was thrilled to get the ideas.

“It’s a gold mine of resources,” Batzel said. “We always go for the typical perspective. It’s not that we don’t want to teach something different; it’s that a lot of teachers don’t realize there’s more out there to share.”

The Center for Colorado and the West at Auraria Library started gathering Latino Colorado history materials eight years ago to supplement a meager 136 digital artifacts focused on Latinos out of 100,000 in the Denver Public Library’s online photo collection.

The organization partnered with Metropolitan State College of Denver’s Teaching With Primary Sources, History Colorado and the Auraria Library to create the class for teachers. An online compilation of resources will soon be available to everyone.

By going directly to descendants of local Latino families, historians gathered photographs, artifacts such as blankets and documents including land grants.

Christine James, who teaches Spanish at Graland Country Day School in Denver, said she got ideas for using history lessons to reinforce language skills.

“They’re not learning what they call ‘baby words,’ ” James said. “With names, I can work on pronunciation. I can use maps and teach them why there are so many places in Colorado with Spanish names.”

Peggy O’Neill-Jones, a professor in Metro State’s Teaching With Primary Sources program, said organizers would like the program Hispanics in Colorado to grow to reach more educators and for the concepts to be expanded to other ethnic groups.

“We’re modeling what we want to bubble to the top because there are so many perspectives,” O’Neill- Jones said. “Just because they didn’t end up in front and center of a textbook doesn’t mean they weren’t here and that their experiences didn’t affect them and their families.”

Connelly said making the connection is important because most of the students in her class are Latino.

“I realized today that we are always telling stories and talking about dead white men with wigs,” Connelly said. “I want to show my students that their people had a place in making the state what it is.”

Teachers on Thursday agreed that making those connections and allowing students to have artifacts or photographs in their hands might help make history lessons memorable.

“When you can personalize the meaning and answer the ‘So what?’ question, that’s a lasting education,” Pearson said.

Yesenia Robles is currently a breaking news reporter for The Denver Post. She has covered education, crime and courts, and the northern suburbs. Yesenia was raised in Denver, graduated from CU Boulder, and speaks Spanish. Call her with your story ideas at 303-954-1372.

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